Dracula: Voyage Of The Demeter (2023) - Movie Review

It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these on here, but we’ve got another preview screening to get through today (thanks again to StudioCanal for reaching out and letting me attend)… and this is an interesting one. After dealing with some Dracula fanfiction over the past twelve months, between the god-awful The Invitation and the pretty goddamn good Renfield, we now have a specific adaptation of the original Bram Stoker novel. More specifically, the chapter ‘The Captain’s Log’ which, in context to the rest of the book, is mainly just an interlude to explain Dracula shifting from one place to another so that the bigger story can continue.

The Tragedy Of Macbeth (2021) - Movie Review

The Coens have another movie out. Or, rather, a Coen has a movie out. While Ethan is taking a break from movies to try his hand at theatre, Joel is… well, he’s kinda doing the same thing here, with an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Yep, after spending their entire career up to this point working together (albeit without always being credited as a duo, because guild rules are weird like that), one of the leading filmmaking teams is now working apart. Between the separating of the paths, and Shakespeare being all about the staging rather than the writing (which, let’s be honest, isn’t exactly how either of the Coens operate), I was certainly curious about how it would turn out, but was willing to accept that things could get a bit shaky. However, nothing of the sort takes place here: Joel can fly solo just as well as he has with his brother up to this point.

In The Heights (2021) - Movie Review

It’s kind of astounding just how much progress director Jon M. Chu has made in just a few short years. Not that long ago, he was making shit like Jem And The Holograms and adding to the increasingly diminished returns of the Step Up sequels. But then Crazy Rich Asians happened and… something must’ve just clicked in his head. I bring this up because his latest has a fair bit in common with CRA, namely in how it’s drenched in a very specific cultural aesthetic and identity; I’m guessing he’s sticking with what he now knows he can work with. But where it gets really crazy is that he has somehow managed to get past even CRA’s genuine visual splendour, and made an even greater film in the process.